Give Up Judgments, Substitute Poetry (John Cage + Rilke)
We found this astonishing line in John Cage‘s ever-illuminatingA Year From Monday. SUCH a good idea. We are starting our week giving up judgments….for….this hunk of gold…
…of a poem by Rilke:
Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete interchange of our own essence with world-space. You counterweight in which I rythmically happen.
Single wave-motion whose gradual sea I am: you, most inclusive of all our possible seas- space has grown warm.
How many regions in space have already been inside me. There are winds that seem like my wandering son.
Do you recognize me, air, full of places I once absorbed? You who were the smooth bark, roundness, and leaf of my words.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
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Further to this idea: the odds are near certainty that every time you breathe, you’re breathing the very same air molecules that passed through the lungs of Jesus! Here’s the math:
https://rsloan.newsvine.com/_news/2009/05/03/2768580-the-odds-that-youll-breathe-a-single-molecule-of-air-that-once-traveled-through-the-lungs-of-jesus